Drew Robb

It looks like a great idea — using extranets, or collaboration portals, to dissolve the boundaries between businesses or organizations, enabling greater knowledge sharing and collaboration. But the concept hasn’t completely fulfilled all those expectations. “If you are talking about a large IP-based network to share with partners and customers, the full potential of extranets […]

After long debate, it’s been decided: your company is hiring an Indian outsourcer to take over many of your shop’s internal IT and software development functions. Now the question is how to break it to your staff? If you wish to maintain any morale at all, be totally honest with your staff. The biggest mistake […]

Computer users have grown spoiled over the years. Earthlink founder Sky Dayton likes to tell the story of how it took him 80 hours to log onto the Internet the first time back in 1993. Now, when someone buys a computer, the modem and connection software come preloaded. Just plug in the cable, and it […]

It was a one-horse race in Datamation‘s Product of the Year wireless category, with the Linksys WRT54G Router/Gateway grabbing 69 percent of the vote. The remaining finalists almost evenly split the remainer of the votes. In second place was the EliteConnect 2.4GHz 802.11b High Power Wireless PC Card (SMC2532W-B) from SMC Networks with 12 percent, […]

A few years ago, National Semiconductor of Santa Clara, CA, used only direct attached storage (DAS). In recent years, the company has gradually transitioned to a combined Storage Area Network (SAN)/Network Attached Storage (NAS) architecture. This has resulted in more rapid backups, less bandwidth being consumed by storage and overall lowered storage costs. But National […]

The Network & Systems Software Product of the year category acknowledges outstanding administration and monitoring software. This year’s winner is Active Administrator (AA) from ScriptLogic Corp. with 56 percent of the votes. Active Administrator is currently only for Windows 2000, setting up and managing policies across the network without the use of agents. Its real […]

Storage consolidation and server consolidation sound great in theory. Reduce the number of servers, cut down on management complexity, and improve return on investment. But does this work out in reality? Should every organization adopt networked storage? Are there parameters that must be met before organizations implement a Storage Area Network (SAN)? “Networked storage doesn’t […]

Few people enjoy the grueling evaluation period that typically accompanies the purchase of storage software and systems. By knowing the key points to consider and learning from the experiences of others, however, it may be possible to make the process less distasteful. Here we take a look at two different approaches in the real world […]

Whether you are speaking of shoes or server operating systems, one size doesn’t fit all. So, while Microsoft still has a way to go before it catches up with Baskin-Robbins’ 31 flavors of ice cream, Windows Server 2003 (W2K3) offers more options tailored to different enterprise applications than ever before. There are now five main […]

Where do IT staffers spend their time? Good question. And there’s a myriad of answers to that one question. And most of the answers point to the fact that a lot of time is spent cleaning up a crisis instead of preventing one or building the business. And upon evaluation, it seems that the answer […]